The Weblog of Dean Groom

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Normal is incompatible. Please re-install diversity.

There have been many opinions about which technologies would radically change the classroom in the last decade. These were ignited by the advent of blogging and in that, the potential new markets and audiences to buy information.

The truth of the matter is, if you want to find success outside the norm, you really have to fine-tune your skills and become incredibly good at what you do. If you’re going to get in the ring, babe, you better know how to box. — Kelly Cutrone (Normal Gets You Nowhere)

I think, after several years of particpating in edu-media – educational technology experts have become mostly experts in talking about educational technology. They have crafted and perfected a pursasion build the lie that technological determinism is normal and will get you everywhere. Normal here is predicated by supply and demand economics which they find profitable. I don’t want that kind of normal thanks.

Most kids turn into adults who share cultural physical space with others. Their glass personalities, carried by invisible data-channels are secondary to the natural world.

We are not the same you and I, and many of us struggle with wondering – if I am going to conform to a type – what type is that? It seems to me, on reflection that I’m not the type to press “I accept” without first wondering what it is. Other people take no interest in glass at all, and they too are normal.

Perhaps we are the first generation to click-away our rights before bothering to read the contract. This seems ironic, given the civil rights movements efforts in previous generations to give us the right to be able to read a contract. We click “yes” before we read it, let alone understand it. The result is a world where corporations mine data and sell it to the highest bidder.

I agree to nothing, especially not the unproven rhetoric which has dominated the stages and conference halls of educational technology. Few seem to ponder the civil rights issues at all. Why would they? actually admitting technology is a loaded weapon pointed at the crowd of innocents is hardly in line with the fallacy of the ‘slippery slope’ of falling educational standards – which has benefitted those who perfected it.

To prove that technology in the classroom is normal we have to stop being normal. That seems to conflict with millions of years of evolution … but in line with the current crop of future-dystopia science fiction such as Elysium

I don’t want my kids or my friends to be normal. I want them to be exceptional – and right now there seems little exceptional emitting from the once influential “Twitter”, just people skimming or aggregating. No one’s creating … everyones re-skinning Skinner.

And from this, we are to expect our children will emerge enthusiastic, ready to take on a future, bounded by filter-bubbles and a lack of privacy.